What is Google AMP?

First off, Google AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages.”

AMP is an open source project that aims to make the mobile web better for everyone, including both publishers and readers alike. They want to achieve that by making mobile sites load as fast as possible.

Currently, not all sites even work on mobile and many of those that do still load very slow and use a lot of memory. That isn’t good for anyone. The user may be wasting their precious data along with their time. The publisher could be losing readers that give up on slow loading content.

AMP wants to change the mobile web by making all web pages simpler and a lot faster.

To learn more about just how AMP works, including technical details, check out ampproject.org.

When will Google AMP go into effect?

The AMP project went into effect in Google on February 24th, 2016.

So far (I’m writing this on February 27th, 2016), it seems like it is having some issues as per my screenshot on the left.

Initially, the project was released on GitHub on October 7th, 2015.

How could Google AMP impact SEO?

Google seems to slowly be letting ads and sponsored content take up all the space above the fold in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Recently, some searches show as few as just one organic result above the fold (or without scrolling down).

Google’s AMP project sometimes gets its own box at the top of the Google SERPs, in which any AMP pages show up.

So in some cases, just having AMP support on your site can be a one way ticket to the top of the SERPs.